H-type indices with applications in chemometrics：h accuracy index (HAI) for evaluating and comparing errors in analytical chemistry

Abstract Inspired by the popular h-index in bibliometrics, an h-accuracy index (HAI) was suggested as a new indicator to evaluate and compare errors in analytical chemistry. HAI simultaneously considers the ‘trueness’ of analytical measurements and the frequency of measurements with high ‘trueness’. HAI was defined as: if the ‘trueness’ of at most M% of the total measurements is no less than M%, the value of HAI will be M%, where a specific definition of ‘trueness’ was given to compute HAI. The range of HAI was between 0 and 1. HAI was used in two problems: (1) as a new index of errors, to evaluate and compare the analytical results by different analytical methods; and (2) to evaluate and compare the prediction performances of different multivariate calibration models. Data analysis indicated that HAI was a reasonable, robust, easy-to-compute, and comprehensive index for evaluating and comparing errors in analytical chemistry.